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Just after midnight last night I typed (ok keyboarded) my first five sentences onto a previously blank white page to start Nanowrimo (nanowrimo.org).

Nanowrimo is a month-long international writing event celebrating National Novel Writing Month. The event encourages writers to write a book in just 30 days. While you’re writing, Nanowrimo provides constant encouragement and support. Their website offers advice and a large online community of writers from all over the world who interact in a long list of forums. Using those forums you can meet other Nanowrimo writers including people in your area. You can even gather offline (you know, in person) for camaraderie to commiserate. Writers are asked to start with a blank page on November 1st and complete a 50,000 word manuscript before midnight of November 30th. If you do that, you win, because you’re really only competing with yourself.

There are a few rules to Nanowrimo besides start date, end date, and writing something new–notes, and previous thinking are allowed–but it’s ok to rebel. In fact, there’s a forum for that!

Five years ago today I participated in my first Nanowrimo. I didn’t win because my word count by the end of the month was a couple thousand shy of the cutoff. But I had the majority of my book completed and I finished the rough draft soon after. That wasn’t the first manuscript I’d ever completed. I wrote my first full length novel in 1995-1996 and several more fiction and nonfiction books since then. So why do I participate in Nanowrimo?

Because it’s fun. And because for those 30 days my writing takes priority over pretty much everything else.

You might be wondering…doesn’t her writing take priority over everything else already since writing is her career?

Yeah…no. It doesn’t. Is your dentist a dentist 24/7? Of course not. Your plumber? Nope. Even your doctor has a life. Writers, like every other human, have to survive, take care of their loved ones, and give the dog a bath occasionally. Besides that, most of the writing I’ve done during my professional writing career has been for other people. My own projects have always been squeezed into my free time. And that is why I’m attracted to Nanowrimo.

I don’t participate every year because life. Sometimes work has prevented me from putting in the time to hit 50,000 words at the end of 30 days. Sometimes personal life was more demanding. But often, for me, it was a matter of overall timing…I wasn’t in the right place on other writing projects to devote a month to something brand new.

It’s not often that I don’t have at least a dozen pages already written on whatever idea bubbles up in my brain. Like most writers I also have many, many writing projects in various levels of disrepair (or despair). For any nonwriters reading this think of that home improvement project started with enthusiasm in 2005. Yeah, we’ll finish someday.

To be honest, I probably shouldn’t be prioritizing a new novel over my ongoing project right now. I’m currently working on the final, final, final, final(!) revision of that book that I started during Nanowrimo 2011. It’s a nonfiction book (yes I’m a nanowrimo rebel) about getting rid of nearly everything we owned, moving halfway across the country in two crap cars with 4 adults and 2 pets, and starting over with pretty much nothing.

Hope that interests you because it’ll be ready to publish soon!

Don’t let that word publish intimate you. Nanowrimo isn’t about publishing. It’s about writing. You never have to show your book to any other living soul and it doesn’t matter if you finish by November 30th. Just start writing and keep writing for a month. If you do, you’re likely to finish what you started by New Year’s, or Spring, or in time for the next Nanowrimo. When you finish doesn’t matter. What matters is that you start and get enough of the story down that you want to keep writing until it’s done.

This year, I’m writing fiction. The last novel I wrote was more than a decade ago, when I was publishing a newspaper. Since then I’ve been writing nonfiction and I’m looking forward to having a more relaxed relationship with reality or the next 50,000 words.

But enough about me. I’m writing this blog post for you. I’m inviting you to join me at Nanowrimo.

Have you written a book before? Great! Write another one!

Have you never written anything longer than a letter/marathon email before? Great! Write your first full length manuscript! That probably sounds crazy impossible hard to those of you who haven’t written a book before. But don’t let that stop you from starting.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been writing forever and have little to show for it. And that’s mostly true. Three decades of professional writing, editing, and publishing have provided me with a plaque for my wall (which is stored in a box), a file of clippings and samples, and an unwavering commitment to the Oxford comma.

I’m not complaining. I’m happy with how my writing career unfolded. As a journalist, business, and technical writer, I’ve had opportunities to write in many different styles and situations, and meet and work with people from all over this country, and beyond this continent. As an instructor, editor, and mentor, I’ve helped new writers of all ages (including children, teens, and retirees) discover the joy of impacting others with words. I’m blessed to be able to say I’ve made a living doing what I love.

But that income has exclusively come from writing other people’s stories. Or helping them learn to write their own.

My writing…short stories and full manuscripts, some factual and others fictional…has always been an after hours activity. What I did during my time off. For the fun of it.

There was always the plan to publish my writing eventually. But I didn’t have much sense of urgency for it. I’ve been content to keep my writing on the side while I earned steady money writing for others. I would get serious about publishing later. When I was older. Someday.

The problem with putting my writing off until later was the risk someday would never arrive. The problem with putting it off for decades was finding myself middle-aged and unable to provide an adequate answer when asked “what have you written that I might have read?”

“Probably nothing” just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

For the past few years, as my illness forced a slow down, and then a full stop to my career of writing for others, my writing stayed right where it had always been…on the side. I’ve been focused on, actually obsessed with, getting back to work. Work, for me, continued to mean writing for others to provide me income.

Over the holidays I finally realized that my definition of work must change. Life has revised my plan and is waiting for me to notice.

I have two choices. I can continue to fight for the way I thought things would be at this time in my life. Or I can choose to see this new plan not as a limitation of what I previously wanted, but as a liberation. Freedom. Opportunity.

Joseph Campbell said “you must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”

With that mantra I’m officially declaring that I have ceased writing for others (Janda Writing and Consulting is closed as of January 1, 2016) and I will be focusing solely on my own projects. I’ll continue with plans to mentor other writers and offer advice and instruction, but those will be on the side. My writing is now my primary work.

I’ll be revamping this website to reflect that change and, hopefully, this shift in focus will provide me more time to blog. My writing goals for 2016 include completIng the final revision of my current work in progress and readying it for publication, offering a couple of writing classes, and reviewing older manuscripts.

For the first time since moving to the coast, I missed seeing flocks of black skimmers gather on Jax area beaches over the winter. They were there on schedule, but I was stuck at home with a scorching case of Achilles tendinitis. Walking in the sand would have felt great. Walking to and from the sand was not possible.

More than a month passed between beach walks at the start of the year. Since then, beach visits are far shorter and less frequent than usual. I miss those daily 3 mile treks through the sand and I’ll have to wait another year to watch black skimmers.

My beach walking companions, Hanna Beach, Jax, Spring 2015

During my grounding from the coast I wondered if it would be the same when I returned. Sure, I knew there would be sand and surf — the most basic beach ingredients. But the details, and even general topography of a beach can change in a day. High tide during a full super moon with an offshore storm can bury the steps and railing of a long-standing wooden walkover under sand and redraw the edge of a dune. Rough seas and wind can sculpt new sand ridges and valleys, and cover yesterday’s tracks with layers of plants and trash from both land and sea.

After a month, would I have to get to know my favorite beach all over again? Would everything be like it was before? Would I feel at home?

Questions like these stem from having too much time to think about stupid stuff thanks to illness (It’s A Parkinson’s Thing) and injury. And from forgetting that their answers (no, no, and yes) were already known to me–following a longer absence last fall from something less tangible than a coastline.

While writing the series of blogs about stories–how they change the world, themselves, and their writers–my story changed. An illness I’ve managed for years progressed. I can’t say that was unexpected. And I can’t say I didn’t know that the balance of writing, working, and living I had in place could be undone by some future storm.

Late last summer one of those storms knocked me far enough off course that I stopped writing.

You read that right.

I’ve been writing since I learned how to hold a pencil and telling stories longer than that. There have been times that I’ve taken breaks from writing, but not a complete, full stop with no plan to restart. What about all those writing rules we read and hear, that writers write every day forever and ever at the same time whether they want to or not, or else? And could I still list writer as my occupation on forms? And would I still be me?

What did I learn from my unscheduled sabbatical? First I discovered that…

Nothing. Bad. Happened.

Instead, it may be the best thing I’ve ever done for my writing.

Hanna Beach, Jax, Spring 2015

Not writing reminded me that I can create without words. I resumed photography and began telling exclusively visual stories–something I hadn’t done since childhood. I no longer consider writing as the bulk of my creative process, but as the last stage of communicating what I create to others–not so much a thing in and of itself anymore, but more of an end to a means.

Several months after I stopped writing, without thinking about it, I opened a document file on my computer and started again. It was that simple–no plan, no stress, no problem. Words surfaced and I wrote them down. It took less effort, and caused less pain, than walking to the truck and driving to the beach with an angry Achilles this spring.

Walking on my favorite beach after an absence I found that while some surface details have changed, I still know the general lay of the sand–where the tidal pools form and which streams dumping that stranded water back to the sea are too deep to cross wearing long shorts if your goal is staying dry. It was the same as returning to writing—the structure of my writing world remained unaltered.

The foundation of your creativity is what’s most important. That’s what needs to be cultivated, nurtured, and reinforced each day. If you do you can take vacations and sabbaticals of any length, or even call it quits, and nothing bad will happen. Not only will you remember how to write, or paint, or sculpt, or take photos, or compose music just as well as you did before, but the surface changes may do you good.

You might even find that not practicing for a while leads to improvement or a breakthrough with a troublesome project. But even if it doesn’t, you’ll still be a writer, or sculptor, or painter, or dancer, or whatever else you were before.

The tide was low and I was wading in the still warm fall surf with beach poet and our yellow dog when I noticed a gathering of dark objects near the dunes. From that distance they looked like a loose pile of skull-sized rocks but I knew they weren’t. Hanna Beach can be rocky at times but it doesn’t have rocks that size.

I thought they were horseshoe crab shells. But I told myself they must be something else as I headed that way to investigate.

Horseshoe crabs on these beaches aren’t unusual. Discarded shells of various sizes, some with their creatures intact, often stay behind in the sand as the sea recedes twice a day. But I hadn’t seen more than a handful together before that walk.

Horseshoe crabs scattered on Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

What I found near the dune was a group of more than two dozen shells, many of them among the largest I’ve seen during three years of walking area beaches. Most of the collection was together, some touching or tumbled off of another, with a few outliers several feet in both directions. A few had crabs or crab parts. Most were full shells or full shells minus a few tears or cracks. Some were resting on top of the sand. Some were buried or nearly buried. There was no pattern to their alignment. It was if a giant hand tossed them up on to the shore and left them where they landed. All of them without a doubt horseshoe crabs.

Horseshoe crabs are easy to recognize, so why would I doubt what I saw from the shore?

Horseshoe crabs scattered on Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

Because it was different.

Changed.

We humans are obsessed with change. Whether we embrace or fear it, work to initiate it or strive to barricade or legislate against it, change is the most reliable aspect of our lives. How we react to it varies but our reactions are emotional. Change makes us FEEL something, just like a good story does.

There’s been a lot said, and written, and studied about what makes a good story, what humans look for or want in stories, and how stories change minds, open hearts, and transform societies. In recent years, marketing has made story their darling, rediscovering that telling a story is the best way to get and keep someone’s attention. Stories and storytelling are everywhere we look, listen, read, and worship.

“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”
–Robert McKee

All of this chatter about what makes a good story and why we like stories and how we use stories to sell apples, promote war, or foster understanding and empathy, has led to a world of writing and storytelling advice ranging from contradictory to awful. There are some gems among the muck, however, and one of those can be found in Lisa Cron’s definition of story.

“A story is how what happens (the plot) affects someone (the protagonist) in pursuit of a difficult goal (the story questions) and how he or she changes
as a result (which is what the story is actually about.” –Lisa Cron,
The biggest Mistake Writers Make and How to Avoid it

Stories are like snapshots, but snapshots capture a moment, whereas stories capture movement.

The Poles at Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

Stories are not just a revelation of what happened. Stories are about how someone changes as a result of what happened. Stories are about change — not external or situational change, but the individual change brought about by those external shifts of circumstance.

Personal growth.

“If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.” — Jean Houston

Good stories–the ones we biologically crave, the ones that stay with us and shape us, the ones that change hearts, minds, and societies–are stories about how people are affected by what happens to them, how we are changed by change. We’re looking for examples of how to react and rebound, or sometimes how not to handle life’s shifts and turns. Regardless of the style or setting, the fairy tales, scifi epics, and literary tomes that captivate us are the ones that change the main characters, the readers or audience, and those of us telling the tale.

Imagine if when we met someone new we asked “What’s your story?” instead of “What do you do?” Their answer would not only be more interesting, but it would provide the information we’re actually seeking. Most of us don’t care what someone’s job title is. What we want to know is what they are about. What’s important to them? Are they someone we want to get to know better?

Part of the story of the Hanna Beach crossover at The Poles is that it’s the northernmost entrance to several miles of continuous public beaches spanning more than 3 coastal communities.

As established in part 1 of this series, Tell Me A Story, telling stories is how we get to know each other and make sense of the world we share. All of us, just by being human, have stories.

“To be a person is to have a story to tell.” — Isak Dineson

One of my first writing students was an older woman who spent her days visiting her husband at an assisted living facility and maintaining the home they once shared. Their children and grandchildren visited regularly, and she participated and volunteered in a few organizations, but she spent much of her time alone. She enjoyed her family, gardening, and painting. Her life was full and happy (aside from the sadness associated with her husband’s health of course). I learned these things about her slowly over the nine-week course. But she told me her story the first night, when I asked each student why they had signed up for Beginning Creative Nonfiction.

She took my class because she wanted to learn how to write about her desperate escape from North Korea as a young girl, her terrifying journey to safety in South Korea, and then her immigration to the U.S. She wanted to document that experience for future generations of her family, people she would not be able to tell in person. And she wanted to leave that legacy for her children’s children’s children bad enough to take a community arts class to learn how to write it.

That was her story as she navigated the last stretch of her life. But it wasn’t her only story. As we got to know each other during the class and after, she also told me stories about life in North Korea before she had to leave, immigrating, adapting to a new culture and becoming an American, and raising a family. She had many stories to tell, but only one she felt compelled to write.

Beach dog’s story is happiness–finding it where ever you are, soaking it in, and sharing it with others.

We sometimes think only writers and other creative people have stories inside them demanding to be shared, but with all humans being born storytellers, there are more than a few people we meet who have stories they want to tell but aren’t sure how or who to share them with.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou

But if we are born to tell and crave stories, if we are living our lives in a sea of stories as we learned in What Is A Story, why does anyone have trouble writing them, or sharing them? Why is it ever hard to find one to tell?

Some of that difficulty stems from the language we use and our culture of story. We describe stories as elusive creatures that must be hunted, discovered, and captured. We tell each other and ourselves that stories are like shark teeth that few people can find, uncover, or receive as whispers from a coy muse.

Stories are not rare trinkets coughed up on the coastline. But they do need to be recognized, picked up, cleaned up, and told. Failure to recognize the stories of our lives and our imaginations causes a large part of writer’s block and creative angst.

We don’t encourage that recognition by constantly asking people what they do, which we all know translates to what’s your job title and what does society pay you for? Those of us who earn a living in creative fields may appear to have similar answers to what do you do and what’s your story. But even for artists, job titles reflect only what others see in us, not who we are or what we see in ourselves and the world around us.

When my student from North Korea was asked what she did she answered “Oh, I’m retired now.” It’s the same answer my grandmother gave toward the end of her life when her story was that she was the keeper of generations of family memories and lore. Earlier in my grandmother’s life she’d been a rebellious teen who risked not graduating high school by getting married before her senior year was over, obsessively frugal from surviving the Great Depression, and a young mother who traveled across the country alone with a toddler while pregnant so that she could see her sailor before he shipped out during WWII. She also bought the house she grew up in and raised her own children in it, thereby keeping it in the family for more than 100 years. She had volumes of stories about her experiences and the lives of several generations before her, and she told them to anyone who would listen, or who sat near her at holidays, reunions, weddings, and funerals. But she wouldn’t say, or even think, any of that when asked what do you do.

I lost touch with the woman from North Korea many years ago and I don’t know if she finished writing her escape story. When my grandmother died, she took all of her stories with her. Nobody ever thought of writing, recording, filming, or otherwise preserving everything she knew, and now we’re left with a handful of black and white photos of people who lived more than a century ago, that we know nothing about. I didn’t realize while my grandmother was still with us, or when I was helping my student, just how vital story is to our lives. Stories not only make sense of our lives and teach us about each other and the world. They also teach us about ourselves. Our stories, real or imagined, shared or closely guarded, make us who we are.

Understanding the power of story has changed how I live. I notice details. I interact with not just people, but also places, and things. And I’ve finally started sharing the stories I tell and write–through the news articles and columns I published in the past, writing classes I’ve taken and taught, this blog, and soon the handful of both fiction and nonfiction manuscripts I have in various stages of polishing, finishing, and dusting off. All of them are pieces of my overall story, but can stand alone, to entertain, inform, caution, or guide whoever reads them.

“Trust your story.” — Neil Gaimen

My answer to what’s your story would have been different through the years depending on where and who I was at the time, but today my story is stories–living them, recognizing them, telling them, writing them, and helping other people write theirs.

What’s your story?

The same Hanna Beach – Poles walkover as pictured above but viewed from the surf. Now its story is an invitation to venture inland, across the dunes and through the trees of the maritime hammock to see what adventure awaits inland.

This is the second of a three-part series on story. Part three will be Stories Change.

We humans are born with a love of stories. Made up. True. Entertaining. Educational. Cautionary. We want them all.

“Next to hunger and thirst, our most basic human need is for storytelling.” —Khalil Gibran

Difficult to reach and see from the public garden it adorns, this iron fan greets those who make a wet approach, marking the start of stories waiting to unfold.

But what is a story? And why do we want them, demand them, love them, and hand them down like keepsakes through generations?

What is a story?

A basic definition of story is an account or narrative of an incident, event, or experience, or a series or combination of these.

What happened can be true but doesn’t have to be. Who it happened to can be a real person, place, or thing, or conjured. The story can be told from any perspective, and by one or many points of view. The same story told by several can range from deja vu to no apparent relation. But each and all is a story.

So pervasive is story in our lives that we continue to create and use phrases and synonyms that, rather than narrow the meaning of the word, infuse it with increasing range and allow for opposing and contradictory meaning.

A story can be news, gossip, true, or a lie. It can be a legend, folklore, fable, or myth, parable, spiel or yarn, anecdote, report, article, or history, fairy tale, novel, biography, or memoir, broadcast, performance, drama, or saga. It can be the excuse you give for getting home late or the plot of a literary masterpiece or award-winning movie. We tell stories with words (spoken, written, or sung), music and dance, and visually with paint, film, pixels, clay, metal, and a mess of other mediums. The story is more important than how it’s told, unless you’re the first to break the news because then it’s a scoop. And if several of us are explaining the same suspicious event and want to ensure that our versions match we have to get our stories straight.

When we look for the story behind the story we’re gathering background information, which leads into the alternate meaning we’ve given the word–the levels or layers of buildings we construct to reach skyward. What better way is there to continuously remind ourselves that levels and layers exist beneath what’s communicated? It’s rare when there isn’t more to the story than what we first hear, read, or observe.

Why are stories critical to us?

The story goes that we can hear the ocean by putting a shell to our ear. Does hermit crab hear the stories of its adopted home’s past inhabitants?

Stories are the way we communicate and relate to each other and our world. They help us navigate our lives. Through stories we prepare and anticipate, explore options, and process what we’ve experienced.

We crave examples of what if and what about and if only. We want to imagine ourselves in someone else’s situation and decide if we would handle it the same way. We want reassurance that we are not alone. Stories provide endless opportunities for all of these.

Sharing stories is how people get to know each other. When we make a friend we don’t give them a list our features and characteristics, we tell stories about our past experiences. We tell stories to explain ourselves, life, and the world. We share stories with others to help them learn from our mistakes and victories, to draw us closer and to set ourselves apart.

We listen to, read, watch, and tell stories not to escape our world but to help us make sense of it, tame it, and find our place in it. Stories shape our world and everyone in it. They are a critical, inescapable component of humanity.

“Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution–more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to…Story is what makes us human, not just metaphorically but literally.” —Lisa Cron

Stories enable growth, innovation, and evolution, not just for each of us individually, but for our societies and species as a whole.

How do stories affect us?

We learn early in life that telling a good story is an excellent way to get someone’s attention and communicate anything important. Our parents and families tell us stories to amuse us, teach us, and put us to sleep. We learn from stories it’s a bad idea to cry wolf, grasp only at low hanging fruit, walk alone to grandma’s house, or accept hospitality from scary old ladies that live in the woods. Stories comfort us with promises that heroes rescue good people and reminders that everyone says goodnight to the same moon.

Young yellow dog’s story: the world is scary but I think I’m brave enough to watch it from the safety of mom’s feet.

“Stories have power. They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate, challenge. They help us understand. They imprint a picture on our minds. Consequently, stories often pack more punch than sermons. Want to make a point or raise an issue? Tell a story.”—Janet Litherland

Stories don’t just envelope us at home or at play. They’re also the foundation of our work and business lives. Marketing is storytelling–from branding to sales to customer retention campaigns. Companies start by telling us their story, then the story of how their products or services made our neighbors happier, smarter, and richer, and finally the story of how good we feel about being part of their story again and again through brand loyalty and repeated purchases.

Do you buy something because of a list of facts and features? Probably not. Usually we buy a particular product because we feel certain it will make our lives better.

“Facts don’t persuade, feelings do. And stories are the best way to get at those feelings.” —Tom Asacker

How many have walked this path to Hanna Beach? Did their stories disappear with their footprints?

The stories we tell ourselves and each other shape our thoughts and beliefs individually, and as members of the various groups we belong to. Families, neighborhoods, schools, organizations and clubs, companies, cities, states, political parties, religions, countries, continents, and the entire world tell and retell the stories that bind us together, differentiate us from nonmembers, and guide our decisions and beliefs about ourselves, those who agree with us, and those who don’t. The power of stories to change the lives of individuals or nations, to start and end wars, to determine how the world perceives our universe and the existence of and passage of time, gave rise to and perpetually defend the cliché that the pen is mightier than the sword.

“The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.” — Harold Goddard

We find a lot of shark teeth on our beach walks. And by “we” I mean other members of my family. Not me. I’m not a shark tooth finder or even hunter (unless you count the teeth still in that shark I rescued, which I don’t). I’m slightly better but not terribly lucky with sea glass. My beach combing super power is spotting half buried sand dollars and dusting them off to reveal they are perfect and complete.

Another day, another dollar

My husband is the shark tooth king of our family. He’s found hundreds in the last couple of years. Most of the teeth he collects are from sand tiger sharks–long and narrow and dark. He also finds teeth so tiny that they look to me like a fragment of broken shell, or maybe a bug in the sand. There’s no tooth too small for his eye, it seems. But he’s still hunting for a big one.

My daughter is the sea glass queen and shark tooth princess. She doesn’t gather many shark teeth but she found one bigger than any my husband has picked up–a likely juvenile great white tooth about 1 1/4 inches long that she now wears as a pendant. Since she found it he’s been on the hunt for a larger tooth, claiming he’ll be the first of us to find one from a Megalodon.

He might still do that. But neither he nor our daughter currently hold largest tooth found honors in our family.

Weirdly, unpredictably, and still unbelievably, that honor belongs to me.

It would never have happened if I’d been walking the dog.

Our yellow lab, Quincy, now 8 months old and more than 70 pounds, is a handful. When he’s calm and his puppy brain is switched fully on he is a perfect gentleman on a leash, but when he’s distracted by sand and water and waves and gulls and other dogs (read: anywhere near the beach), he goes puppy deaf to voice commands and requires a strong hand at the other end of the leash. Consequently my husband does most of the dog walking, which isn’t compatible with scanning the sand for triangles.

I wasn’t scanning the sand either, at least not beyond making sure that I wasn’t going to step on something sharp or jellied. But off to the side of my left foot, I saw a dark glint.

“Hold up.”

Over the winter several pieces of fossilized bone have washed ashore on our favorite beach. We’ve collected numerous bone chunks of various sizes. We aren’t sure what we want to do with them–beyond piling them on every surface next to our whelk shells and sand dollars of course–but we keep gathering them anyway. I thought the glint I caught was another piece of bone until I touched it.

It was definitely not bone, fossilized or otherwise.

Only an inch of what turned out to be the center the smooth dark object was visible. All edges and ends were covered with sand. I brushed off the root end first, and then quickly picked up what I knew had to be a tooth.

But I was having trouble believing it.

I would have had trouble believing I had found any size tooth, since it was my first in nearly three years of walking these beaches. But my disbelief was bigger because the tooth I’d found was huge.

The whole tooth

“Hey look at this!”

I am now the proud and happy wearer of a 2 inch long, 1 1/4 inch wide at the root, great white shark tooth pendant. It’s gaudy big and heavy and I’m not a big necklace person but I wear it anyway. I treasure my gift from the sea.

The last time I wore it to the beach a stranger stopped me and said “You didn’t find that here, did you?”

Yes I did, about a quarter of a mile down the beach, on an ordinary day, when I wasn’t even looking. I tell people I nearly tripped over it but honestly I almost passed it by. If it wasn’t for the glint and my willingness to look closer, that tooth would have been someone else’s find. This would be someone else’s story.

I’m glad it’s mine. But more than that, I’m glad I’ve learned to look for the story beyond what is first visible.

A million years ago when I first started writing, I thought that stories and creative ideas were born fully formed like babies. Sure they needed to be nurtured and to grow into their adult form, but they basically were what they appeared to be at their birth.

Sometimes that is true. But often it’s not. And if we don’t explore beyond what we readily see, or hear, or smell, or feel, or think–if we don’t test the boundaries and look below and beneath and behind–we risk not knowing.

We miss the joy of what if.

Is what we saw what we really got? Was there more to the story? What came before? Who else was involved? What more could we learn? What does it mean? Where next?

This is true for everyone and every day life. But it’s extra true for writers and artists. It applies to creators of fiction and nonfiction alike, to both entertainment and education, and in business as well as our personal lives.

The key to not missing out on the more is slowing down. Take a longer look. Brush away the sand.

Some companies treat hiring a freelance writer like hiring an employee or a temp–drafting a list of must have traits and experience and then excluding any writer that doesn’t fit that mold. But a great freelance writer isn’t an employee or temp. They are a supplier. When you contract with a freelance writer, the content they provide is a product that you, for whatever reason, can’t or choose not to create in-house. You are outsourcing, which is a completely different and yet familiar business arrangement.

Contracting with a supplier doesn’t start with an interview. It starts with a meeting where you explain your content requirements and the writer describes how those needs will be met. The goal should be the development of a comfortable business relationship that is profitable to all participants.

As you conduct your search for a supplier to create the content you need, there are a few things you should NOT do if you want to hire a great freelance writer.

1. Insist that a writer is an expert in your field, industry, or product, or has previously written for your industry.

It sounds ideal doesn’t it? It seems logical that the best freelance writer to hire is someone who already knows everything about the subject. But a Subject Matter Expert (SME) isn’t the best choice for your freelance writing project.

Why? Because…

Being an expert in a subject, field, or industry, doesn’t make someone a great writer, a good writer, or even a passable writer.

You already have SMEs on staff.

An SME who does happen to be a decent writer may use jargon and may have trouble converting complicated processes or concepts into straightforward copy that readers can understand.

The best choice for your freelance writing project is an expert writer. An expert writer is a professional capable of conducting research, interviewing your SMEs, coordinating with your personnel to obtain feedback and approval on drafts and revisions, and delivering finalized content on time.

2. Decide in advance that you will only hire a freelance writer who is a journalist, or is not a journalist, or who has a particular degree, or specific industry experience.

You can find a lot of advice about hiring freelance writers and much of it is conflicting. One person may urge you to hire a former journalist because they have experience interviewing and researching and writing about topics they previously knew little or nothing about. But another warns against hiring a former journalist because they might be adversarial and focus on facts. This one says you can’t go wrong if you hire writers with a college degree in English, or Communications, or Marketing, while that one claims you should only hire writers with an advanced degree in a field for your industry or decades of industry work experience.

It’s possible to find a great freelance writer with any or many of those traits, but it’s bad advice to insist on a particular background and exclude in advance any writer that doesn’t have the desired title or certification. What’s more important is the ability of the freelance writer to produce good content on your timetable.

3. Expect to get all three points on the fast-cheap-good triangle.

Professional writing is like anything else your business buys.

If it’s fast and cheap it might be adequate but it won’t be good.

If it’s fast and good it won’t be cheap.

If it’s good and cheap, expect it to take a while.

Don’t waste time chasing the fast, cheap, good writer mirage. Budget for a professional, find a professional, and contract with a professional. Isn’t your business worth that?

To hire a great freelance writer, look for someone who is an expert in the field of writing–someone with a demonstrated ability to organize, research, interview, and write well, and with a history of meeting deadlines. Don’t make a sometimes difficult process worse by refusing to consider a writer who could be exactly what you need.

As you may have noticed, some changes have been made around here since the first of the year. In addition to giving the site a makeover, I’ve streamlined the categories for my blog posts and added a new page, About Writing.

Let’s tackle those blog changes first. Most blog posts are now placed into at least one of three main categories–Creative Nature, Writing Words, and Content Characteristics.

Creative Nature posts are about the cyclical nature of chronic creativity. What does a creative life look, smell, or sound like? These are the topics of posts in the creative nature section. And if it’s my beach posts you love, you’ll find them in this category.

Writing Words contains posts about tips and tricks of the trade, issues in the writing world, and general How To information about many kinds of writing. Posts in this section focus on the writing process, from idea to draft, through revision, and then to the final form.

The Content Characteristics category is for posts about the product rather than the process–developing content, reworking, reusing, and repurposing content, content marketing, writing project management, and organizing, compiling, designing, and managing documentation systems, collections, and manuals/books. I haven’t posted any blogs for this category yet but I’ve got one in the queue and more to follow.

Previous blog entries have been reclassified into the new categories. If more than one category applies to a post it will be found in each appropriate category. Posts that don’t fit into any of those, such as housekeeping and announcement posts like this one, will remain uncategorized.

The new About Writing page is designed to provide access to not just blog posts but also longer articles, white papers/case studies, and eventually courses and ebooks about writing. I’m in the process of revamping my course materials from my writing instructor days into ecourses and webinars. When completed, they’ll be added. I’ve launched the page with a variety of articles and the quick access links to blog post categories. As more content is added I’ll post brief announcements.

Now about that makeover. I’m going for cleaner, more direct, and easier to navigate and find what you want to read. The Beach Writer site is for all kinds of writers and creatives, as well as people looking for someone who can do their writing for them. That’s a lot to ask of one website so please let me know where you think I’m succeeding and where I should try again.

Finally, a large, sun-drenched, sand-covered THANK YOU to all of you who read, follow, and encourage me! And for those who are still experiencing winter, a glimpse of something warm…

I’ve never been very good at the whole New Year’s reflection and resolution-making routine. I’m more of a cycles person. I prefer marking time by watching the seasons come and go, and enjoying the uniqueness, and the familiarity, of each.

This is the start of my third winter in Jax, and I’m getting the hang of what to expect.

Winter in Jax is cool enough to empty the beaches of swimmers and sun worshipers most days, leaving plenty of room for walkers, runners, cyclists, fishermen, kite-fliers, treasure hunters swinging metal detectors hoping to find something wonderful hidden in the sand, and sea birds. Large flocks gather on the beach during the winter months, most of them a mix of two or three types of gulls and terns, sandpipers and willets.

Black Skimmers and friends on Jax Beach, 2012

Winter also means groups of Black Skimmers will gather along the shore. Their dark feathers and bright orange beaks jump out in contrast to the whites, greys, and browns of most of the shore birds, sand, sea foam, and cold weather surf. This is the only time of year when the black skimmers are local and they don’t stay more than a couple of months before moving on. But while they’re here, they add a bit of interest to my shoreline walks.

More skittish of humans than our year round birds, the black skimmers tend to stay bunched together and when disturbed they usually fly off and land again as a group. During one of my walks last year a flock repeatedly flew beautiful black and orange arcs out over the water each time I got close. I’m looking forward to their return later this month, just as I anticipate the flowers dotting the dunes in spring, the summer heat that restricts my walks to early or late and prompts beach goers to set up rainbow and gem colored umbrellas, and the fall nor’easters that rough up the surf and send ashore all kinds of things previously claimed by the sea.

These patterns and routines free my mind so that I can create and build worlds with words. The occasional splash of color, wheel and swoop, beds of shells and sea glass, or stray beached baby shark, remind me to notice the different and unique among the known and familiar. I need both, in the right balance, to inspire my best writing.

My business writing happens year round, of course, on the client’s timetable. But my personal writing tends to be a bit seasonal. In the winter I mostly revise, refresh, and plan new projects that I’ll tackle in the spring and hopefully complete by late fall.

By the time the skimmers arrive I’ll have already settled into my winter beach routine and the windy, chilly days when I walk more briskly and with my hood up will be commonplace. Wonderfully familiar but customary, until I see that first black skimmer. Then my imagination will fly.